The Drappie from the Highland Line

By Anthony Troon
Reproduced from the SMWS newsletter, Spring 1991, with permission

A phantom railway line
runs through the manager's
office and visitor centre at the
Aberfeldy Distillery. All that
remains of it is a flat
embankment of grassland and
traces of masonry where steam
locos once rumbled over the
driveway.

But when this most attractive
distillery was built here in 1898,
overlooking the swollen River Tay
and the winding road through
Grandtully to Perth, the railway line
was an important factor in its
location.

For the Aberfeldy was designed
to be a blending malt to fatten and
enrich whiskies of the Dewar dynasty,
which grew from a wine and spirit
wholesale operation based in Perth.
So, in the 1890s, access to a railway line
(with a private siding) was a significant
business asset.

But there was more. These
"Breadalbane lands" of upper
Perthshire had a long tradition of
whisky-making from the time when
this most worthwhile activity of
prudent and inventive farmers became
something to be licensed and policed
by the Excise - with a bit of
undeclared distilling on the side. All
of these pieces of the whisky mosaic
have thrived in this luscious, wooded
backwater.

There had been another
distillery close to Aberfeldy, called
Pitilie. This been a typical farm-based
operation of the mid-19th century. In
Aberfeldy Past and Present (N.D.
Mackay, 1954) there's a description
of the remains of this distillery which
took its name from its water-source,
the Pitilie Burn. The barley was
malted at a nearby farm, in a building
with a hard clay floor over which the
steeped grain was spread to
germinate. Mackay tells how this
floor was constructed:

"First the clay was spread evenly
over the area to be covered. Sheep
were then driven over it slowly, to and
fro, until it was trampled and packed
to a hardness as of concrete; simple,
yet effectual."

Not a process, however, that
would find favour with today's health
authorities Nevertheless, a century later, the
floor was still sound enough for the
building to he used as a tractor shed.

Pitilie Distillery closed in about
1867: but the fact that its burn water had
been proved in whisky-making was
another factor in siting the Aberfeldy
Distillery. So when you sip the Aberfeldy
you are saluting a vanished cratur from
another generation.

The busy Dewars were expanding
their blending and bottling operation in
the late 19th century, and began to build
or acquire malt distilleries to safeguard
their production. There was a nostalgic
aspect in their choice of Aberfeldy, for the
original John Dewar's crofter parents had
lived in this iovely strath.

Here they wanted to produce a good
blending malt, a whisky of high quality
which was neither too assertively peaty
nor too light in character. They got it
right: for today, with the Aberfeldy part
of the United Distillers group, its whisky
has a nutty robustness halfway between
the tang of Lagavulin and the subtlety of
Rosebank, which are Islay and Lowland
malts. Yet the Aberfeldy is undoubtedly a
Highland style whisky.

The design of the Aberfeldy
Distillery clearly marked the advance from
farm-based production to an industry in its
own right. The buildings form a long,
continuous row. The barley was delivered
at one end, at the barley lofts, and passed
in a production flow through the steeps,
malting floors, kiln, dressing, mashing,
washback and distilling sections to emerge
transformed ar the other end, where the
casks were filled and taken to the adjacent
warehouses.

Nowadays, as is the case
with most such distilleries, the
malting is carried out elsewhere.
Aberfeldy gets most of its malted
barley from the Glenesk
Maltings, Montrose, and its
requirements are for a medium-peated
grain.

This distillery was expanded
in 1972 from one pair of stills to
two. But the manager, Brian
Bisset said a highly traditional
approach to whisky-making
remained paramount, with wooden
washbacks rather than stainless
steel, and
with no computerisation. "Here, we still
work by skill and judgement rather by
machine programs."

He has worked at many malt
distilleries - North Port, Glenlossie,
Mortlach, Glentauchers, Dailuaine,
Strathisla - before going to Aberfeldy
nearly eight years ago. What struck him
immediately about the Aberfeldy operation
was the exceptionally slow distillation
rate of the wide-necked stills. Before the
spirit is captured, the foreshots are allowed
to run for a long time, up to three times
as long as at some other distilleries, in his
experience.

"It is a gentle distillation which
produces a purer and gentler spirit," he
said. "This gentleness was clearly what
the founders sought in a good blending
malt. "

But not all of this mellow
Perthshire beastie disappeared into the
blending vats. Some has long been
available as a single-malt through the
independent bottlers Gordon & MacPhail:
and in 1988, thanks to Brian Bisset's
persistence (he put the idea to Sir
Norman Macfarlane, chairman of Guiness
plc!) the distillery has organised its own
bottlings. Three butts were selected for
bottling in 1988, rising to ten this year.
The label says " 15-year-old", but in fact
the actual age has been from 17 to 20
years.